DATELINE: 30th November 2000
ESTONIA FIND
Dive team proves that Estonia was holed
The car and passenger ferry Estonia, which sank in the Baltic in 1994 with the loss of 853 lives, could have been crippled by a hole on or close to the waterline. That's the view of an American diving team that has completed an examination of the vessel, which lies in 70m of water.
The official report into the accident maintained that it was the ferry's bow visor and forward ramp that became dislodged, allowing flooding to occur.
The US team was headed by Gregg Bemis, boss of the Californian commercial diving company Deep Ocean Engineering. He ignored a ban on diving the wreck imposed by Sweden, Finland and Estonia, co-signatories including Britain, Denmark and Latvia.
As the Estonia lies in international waters, Bemis could not be stopped from diving, but could have faced arrest if he had landed in any of those countries.
Despite the resistance of politicians to the project, Bemis - who owns the wreck of the Lusitania off southern Ireland - maintains that it was his own venture and that he was not put up to it by any sources wishing to expose possible errors in the official report into the accident.
A team of nine divers examined the wreck for more than a week in early September, backed up by an ROV and filming in video and stills.
Just before they started, a Finnish member of the wreck's investigation commission admitted that videotape shot soon after the vessel sank showed what appeared to be hole in the hull's forward section, but said that it was not large enough to have caused the ferry to sink. Previously, any perforation of the hull had been denied.
The divers soon confirmed the presence of a hole. "We have indications that there is a hole on the mudline of the starboard side, approximately 15m after the [bow] thruster," Mario Weidner, the dive-team leader, is reported to have told Fairplay International Shipping Weekly. But Weidner added that the video footage would need to be examined before it could be deduced that the hole might have contributed to the sinking.
Gregg Bemis described the hole as being 25-30m from the bow. It was large enough to allow the divers to enter the hull.
"We went in about six feet to look for explosive activity, but we can't be sure about that until we've analysed the footage," he is reported to have said. The divers did not continue into the car deck.
Bemis said the team had bad weather and unusual trouble with GPS accuracy and satellite phones. A sonar fish was lost.
*Latest news is that Gregg Bemis has openly suggested that sabotage sank the Estonia. Associated Press reports that Bemis, responding to attacks from Sweden, said: "I think they should be more concerned with the 852 people who were murdered." Bemis' clear inference is that the wreck's waterline hole was caused by a bomb.